Robert Knight Defends Scott Lively Against Mean New York Times (UPDATED)

I’m fighting the temptation to type out a bunch of exclamation points and various other characters, paste the hyperlink, and hit post.

But no, let’s look at this. Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries, and former Concerned Woman for America, has written a piece in which he claims that the New York Times editorial “Hate Begets Hate,” which correctly points out that American Evangelicals Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundige and Don Schmierer helped feed the culture of hatred against gays which has led to the awful “kill the gays” legislation in Uganda, is merely a smear piece focused on “crucifying Christians.” Well, get up off the fainting couch, Bob, because we need to have a discussion.

This humdinger of a self-descriptive screed has it all: wild, unsubstantiated charges; villains; hysterical calls for action and a smug, holier-than-thou tone that would put Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady to shame.

(…)

I don’t know Mr. Brundidge, but I do know Mr. Lively and Mr. Schmierer. Both are honest and courageous men who, out of Christian compassion, dare to tell the truth about homosexuality. For this, the Times brands them as hatemongers.

While Mr. Lively has written perceptively and passionately about countering the homosexual activists’ political and cultural agenda, there is no evidence of “hate.” Trying to steer someone away from destructive, immoral, changeable behavior is an act of love, not hate.

(…)

And it is beyond absurd to label as a bigot a man like Don Schmierer, who supports AIDS ministries and reaches out to sexually conflicted people with the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ. Casting the gentle, soft spoken Mr. Schmierer as a “hater” is like calling Mother Teresa a foul-mouthed harpy.

Honest? Christian compassion? The truth? Perhaps, you’ve missed the news, Bob, but we now have video evidence that your compassionate, honest friend Scott Lively, who has spent his entire career smearing gay people as serial killers, murderers, and Holocaust instigators, indeed told that Ugandan audience that gay people were responsible for the Rwandan genocide! I don’t know in what possible world that could be considered honest, compassionate, or anything resembling the truth, but if that’s the world where you live, Robert Knight, I hope never to visit it. In case you’re not aware, no credible historian supports Lively’s specious and evil claims.

Also specious and evil is Robert Knight’s claim that one’s sexuality can be changed through “therapy,” an idea which is condemned by virtually every authoritative body which has weighed in on the subject. I could look around the internet for links, but there’s no need. It’s all on this little website called Truth Wins Out. Perhaps Mr. Knight has heard of it.

And as to Don Schmierer, the fact that he’s gentle and soft-spoken is quite irrelevant, and as I’ve pointed out before, Don Schmierer’s life’s mission of convincing hurting gay people that they have to change who they are in order to find favor with God is not love, but instead, intense hatred at its core. Schmierer may not feel that he’s being hateful, but because he is working within the hateful, unscientific, and verifiably harmful “ex-gay” movement, he is a party to that hatred, and any blood that is spilled is equally on his hands. Besides, people much closer to the situation than I am tried to warn Schmierer not to go. Schmierer doesn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, in general, but when he allowed himself to be associated with this, even after being warned of the nature of the event and the character of the people involved, he signed off on it.

You can read Knight’s entire bilious screed if you want, but the quote above is really all you need to know. As he comes near to the close of his piece, he says this:

The Times’ editors need to come to terms with their knee-jerk spasms against evangelical Christians and others who defend family values. They routinely depict pro-marriage Americans as motivated solely by hatred and prejudice, never by genuine, heartfelt concerns.

Yeah, well, this isn’t about “pro-marriage Americans,” Bob. This is about three men who went to a nation already rife with homophobia and handed them the proverbial gun needed to justify their desires to go ahead and start killing gay people.

You should be ashamed of yourself, for the hatred and prejudice you euphemistically refer to as “genuine, heartfelt concerns,” and to which you are now giving aid and comfort, is on the verge of producing a verifiable bodycount in Uganda.

I’m quite sure there were apologists for the Spanish Inquisition, and I bet they had “genuine, heartfelt concerns,” too.

UPDATE: Wayne left this comment below, but I thought it deserved to be highlighted within the piece:

I stood next to Mr. Knight in 1998 at The National Press Club in Washington. He was there to tout a million dollar Pray Away the Gay advertising campaign called “Truth In Love.” Mr. Knight called this effort the “Normandy Landing in the Cultural War.”

The press conference featured John Paulk and Michael Johnston, the two ex-gay poster-boys of this time period.

In 2000, I photographed Paulk in a gay bar. In 2003, with the help of attorney Michael Hamer, we caught Johnston having gay Internet orgies. He disappeared after admitting a “moral fall”.

The bottom line is that Mr. Knight has paraded so-called “ex-gays” in front of America before. His so-called success stories did not pan out. His track record is abysmal.

Clearly, Mr. Knight has squandered his credibility on this issue and is the last person in America who should be saying that one can go from gay to straight. His own very public activism strongly suggests otherwise.

Mr. Knight must believe people are either stupid or have amnesia. However, many of us remember the fraud he perpetrated in 1998.

To try to pull the same craven and cynical publicity stunt in 2010, suggests a man with few scruples, a capacity for intellectual dishonesty and an addiction to propaganda that neatly fits into his warped world view.

Mr. Knight, is it not time you tiptoe off the public stage before you further humiliate yourself and do more harm to your cause?

I stood next to Mr. Knight in 1998 at The National Press Club in Washington. He was there to tout a million dollar Pray Away the Gay advertising campaign called “Truth In Love.” Mr. Knight called this effort the “Normandy Landing in the Cultural War.”

The press conference featured John Paulk and Michael Johnston, the two ex-gay poster-boys of this time period.

In 2000, I photographed Paulk in a gay bar. In 2003, with the help of attorney Michael Hamer, we caught Johnston having gay Internet orgies. He disappeared after admitting a “moral fall”.

The bottom line is that Mr. Knight has paraded so-called “ex-gays” in front of America before. His so-called success stories did not pan out. His track record is abysmal.

Clearly, Mr. Knight has squandered his credibility on this issue and is the last person in America who should be saying that one can go from gay to straight. His own very public activism strongly suggests otherwise.

Mr. Knight must believe people are either stupid or have amnesia. However, many of us remember the fraud he perpetrated in 1998.

To try to pull the same craven and cynical publicity stunt in 2010, suggests a man with few scruples, a capacity for intellectual dishonesty and an addiction to propaganda that neatly fits into his warped world view.

Mr. Knight, is it not time you tiptoe off the public stage before you further humiliate yourself and do more harm to your cause?

MerlynJanuary 15, 2010 at 2:59 pm -

Knight is a real piece of work. I’ve been looking at some of his column and those of his ilk and they are some really sick puppies, all right. The one one the safe-schools czar is simply off the charts.

The individuals who perpetrated this mess in Uganda with their shrill anti-GLBT rhetoric should be tried for inciting to murder if the law goes through. I know Musaveni says it’s under his control, but only time will tell.

Actually Michael Johnston, when he disappeared, went to the live in program at Pure Life Ministries. After he was “healed” apparently AGAIN he shortened his name to Mike and is now in “senior leadership” with Pure Life Ministries in KY.

“Mike Johnston serves as Director of Donor and Media Relations. He coordinates media relationships for the ministry and production of audio content including the podcast. In 1989, Mike founded Kerusso Ministries and spent the next 14 years presenting a Christian perspective on homosexuality as it relates both to ministry and public policy. He has been with the ministry since 2003.”

Murder is not “Christian compassion.” Radical anti-gay activist Knight, as part of the Fundamentalist Taliban, would love to implement a “Kill the Gays” Bill in the US. The test ground is Uganda. If they can get it passed there, it will spread all over Africa. Then they can use that as a spring board to destroy US gay families and murder law-abiding, taxpaying, gay Americans. This is why militant anti-gay activist Knight, etal. are in such a tizzy and frothing at the mouth–their evil plans are being exposed and thwarted.

WilliamJanuary 16, 2010 at 8:18 am -

Let’ look at something that Scott Lively, who represented himself as probably knowing more than almost anyone else in the world about homosexuality, actually said early on in his introduction to his Ugandan audience:

“… two people very close to me brought me to an understanding of this topic. One of them was a little four-year-old boy, and he was one of the sweetest little children you would ever have known: he was just an adorable, lovable child. And the other person was very close to me as well, and that man, when he was nineteen years old, he molested that four-year-old boy. And I saw what happened to that little child. He was transformed into [sic] a sweet and innocent person into a tortured and tormented child, filled with anger and rage. And he never recovered from that. Even though he got counselling, he went on and he never really addressed it. There were other people in his life that tried to cover it up and say “It’ not an issue; don’t think about it; don’t talk about it”, and he ended up — even today, his life is destroyed.”

If the topic under discussion had been the harm done by the sexual abuse of children, that would have been unexceptionable. As an introduction to the subject of homosexuality — especially in a country where homophobia is already rife — it is a flagrant attempt to inflame hatred and prejudice.

Suppose that (per improbabile) I gave a lecture on the subject of heterosexuality, on which I claimed to know probably more than almost anyone else in the world, and said the following:

“Two people reasonably close to me brought me to an understanding of this topic. One of them was a little girl in my sister’ class at school, who revealed that her father was regularly having sex with her. The other was a heterosexual teacher at my brother’ school, who was brought to trial for sexually molesting his two little step-daughters.”

What would I be trying to achieve by means of such a discourse? It’ as plain as a pikestaff.

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